Mr. Money Mustache gets Passed the Early Retirement Torch

The word on the street today is that Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme is quitting his post as President of the blogging-about-how-we-should-all-spend-less-so-we-can-quit-our-jobs-in-our-thirties scene. He’s doing it to focus on, if you can believe it, an exciting new JOB that he just accepted as a quantitative analyst in the financial industry. It’s a big moment, because he has been doing a great job at not having a job for quite a few years now, and has earned a gigantic and loyal following and written a nice textbook about the subject as well.

In the post, he said he wanted to pass the torch to Mr. Money Mustache. I found it very touching, because he has told me in the past that the main reason he kept the ERE blog going so long is to support people who were benefiting from his help. The common feeling is that financial independence through frugality is not a very well supported thing in our society yet. There’s lots of information out there on making and investing money, and lots of completely different websites on frugality and simple living. But apparently not that many people write about combining the two interests and then running them both full-tilt to achieve an early retirement.

But I can’t claim to be a replacement for Early Retirement Extreme. I’m a simpler and more easily fulfilled man, and so I tend to write more about specific lifestyle issues and their effect on one’s ‘Stash, as opposed to broad social trends. I also tend to offend many more people (as you’ll see in the comments to his farewell letter), and I admit that while I don’t mean to offend them, I do get some enjoyment from reading angry comments when I come across them. Controversy is good, since the goal here is obviously to shake things up.

Really, I’m just a guy sitting on the couch typing things into a computer. But because of YOU, it is a whole world of fun. So thanks very much to all. And I dedicate this video to Jacob, just because I always sing this song whenever the the phrase “pass the torch” comes up in conversation:

Whoa there Naomi.. if you read his farewell article, he mentions that people saying unfriendly things about him, as you just did, is one of the reasons that blogging became old for him. Neither of us mean to condescend or be arrogant – each of us just happens to have our own style with which we enjoy writing, which happens to piss some people off.

It’s okay to say things about me, because as I mentioned I have a twisted sense of enjoyment. But when we’re talking about other people on the Good Guys Team, it’s usually best to learn from them rather than dissing them.

I kind of agree with here – only, I never felt it was a bad thing. I mean, its hard to write a sociological piece about the masses of Matrix blinded sheeple with “slave” mentality, point out that ones self has seen the light, and not come across as condescending.
The main difference I see between the two of you is you stick primarily to practical advice where Jacob delved more into philosophy and psychology. Plus, since he was “extreme”, he was more likely to offend people who were on board with the general concept but didn’t go as far as him, while the only people you are calling out for their idiocy are people who finance Cadillac Escalades and then get payday advance loans to cover the cable bill – and those people likely aren’t reading either blog.

All this just to say, I feel Naomi’s comment is fair, but with the caveat that it is not a diss, its an observation – maybe even a good thing; tough love as it were: if one is offended by it, that’s probably a sign you’re doing something wrong.

I’m glad that it’s not the other way around, to be honest. Having MMM stop and ERE continue would’ve been a bigger loss.

To be brutally honest, I have a very hard time relating to a guy, with no kids living in a trailer in the SF bay area.
I have a much, much easier time relating to MMM.

I found ERE to lack humour, warmth and…a bit more normality.
I like MMM because it’s more straight-forward, has more humour, more warmth, less ivory-tower rants about the pleeps around you and much more down to earth.
That Jacob is joining the banking industry is just another nail coffin for me being put off by ERE (the blog).

Basically judging from the blogs, MMM seem like a guy I’d have a beer with – ERE not so much.

Of course one could ask, why it matters if I want to have a beer with X or Y, but I think it matters, because to take advice really to heart, it’s easier to do so from a person that holds a degree of respect from you, and that you can more easily relate to.
Not to mention taking lifestyle advice from someone lives a life you would not want to live, is a little more difficult too.

Simplemoney and MMM is the places I enjoy reading these days – So thank you MMM for continueing to spread your advice and thoughts.

One piece of advice in the parting…The best parts of ERE (the blog) was the forums. In that case, it might be another reason why it’d be good with a forum here, if you’ve still not warmed up to that idea.

I’ve had a beer with Jacob (well, not literally, because I don’t like beer).
Despite his writing style, he’s a perfectly friendly guy in person.

Aside from that though, I feel like its really important to recognize the value of the wisdom of those that push the boundaries.
For example, I don’t want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But if I’m going to work out, I want to know what exercises Arnold does, not my neighbor with a gym membership, no matter how relateable my neighbor is.

I like MMMs writing style too, but in all honesty, the majority of what he talks about has always been obvious to me, so I’ve learned more from ERE.
And of course, MMMs readership is a part of what keeps him writing, and that readership is due in very large part to Jacob sending them here.

Yeah, I like to give him lots of credit too, (the stats suggest that about one fifth of regular MMM readers are from ERE, and even more than that number show up as regular commenters).

You are right about the originality factor – Jacob has much more of a researcher personality, so his blog and book like to try to focus on only the things that are not immediately obvious to even an intelligent and well-informed person.

My mission is totally different – In university I had the quintessential Engineer personality – I always hated fussy impractical things such as mathematical “proofs”, but loved making really useful programs with really simple user interfaces. Since then my life’s work has to been to try to take the complex and make it simple – put everything in one place, open the box and it works immediately and automatically.. stuff like that.

This blog represents everything that I thought would be self-evident and unnecessary to write, but I was shocked into having to write it after I started learning about the way our society actually works. For example, I didn’t even know that ANYONE over age 14 was still living paycheck-to-paycheck until just a few years ago. When I found out that many people making over $100k per year are in this situation, it changed everything for me.

In my view, the problem is not that new ideas about financial wisdom need to be developed.. the problem is that they are not entertaining enough to spread naturally through society, and their value is too complicated to be immediately appreciated. We need to make them simpler, so they are easier to share.

We weren’t making $100k but we were making too much to be as broke as we were (essentially taking up debt to make ends meet).

What was more horrid than that, though, was the fact that we felt powerless to stop it. Like that’s just how people live in LA.

I know I came across this earlier and initially wrote it off because I felt it was too extreme or something I couldn’t do. That is, until I was ready to change. I still don’t do what you do but I do incorporate a lot of your mindset and systems to a degree that I can live with instead of writing it off.

The big difference was that I needed someone to tell me that there was another way and to call me out on my bs. I now can believe that it’s possible to be debt free and save a large percent of our money and not feel deprived. Before I just didn’t believe it was possible to live any other way without feeling deprived.

Agree completely. People need to stop looking into one blog, or one person for life guidance, and create their own path from the bits and pieces that fit their lives. I used his experiences to find the ways to live even more frugally (and most importantly, to get my wife on board), but those of us with kids, we could not match his lifestyle nor should we feel like we have to.

Also, Jacob was raised in Europe (read: no sugarcoating in his writing style) and he seems very cerebral (again, straight facts, no sugarcoating). So, when reading ERE, you need to approach it as a science paper.

Though, this is actually means I can gather the mental strength to start going through his material. Earlier it would have been 4 years of material, plus any material written while I was reading the past material. Now it’s more like a book, it has an end. I might be a bit weird.

And along the lines of what Oskar comments, if what you’re doing is “condescending arrogance”, then condescending arrogance is fairly awesome.

I’ve been an ERE fan since I discovered the blog and an MMM fan since MMM wrote a guest post on ERE. They are different blogs/writing styles that I think different purposes, so I’m sad that ERE is fading.

MMM – I love the tone/humor of your posts!!!!! Please don’t change a thing. You can never please all of the people all of the time.

I take MMM’s point about learning from the good guys rather than dissing them, but my friends know they’re my friends because they can criticize me. I think it’s fair to say that Jacob’s tendency to dismiss opposing viewpoints sometimes put people off learning from his good stuff. I know it did for me.
(I’m kind of unsure about posting this as I don’t want to provoke or annoy people, but I think it needs saying.)

However I appreciate the ERE because it showed me that I could always do even more if I chose to do so. We all find our spot on the range where one side is a free-spending train wreck and on the other side is Jacob.

You should never follow anyone blindly (that is called religion) but take bits and pieces and build your own plan from there.

Jacob should be thanked and appreciated as I he helped change some lives for the better. That is probably all he wanted to do anyway. I never got a feeling that he was preaching that we should all live like him, nor was he judgmental if you chose to be less extreme than him.

I’ve been a fan of ERE for years. But – sorry Jacob – MMM just does ‘fit’ me better. I’m more mustachian than extreme.

Glad his site will continue to be a resource, and glad this site exists to pass the torch to.

As I said on the early retirement (not ERE) forum, thanks Jacob for your service to the ER community. Glad you found your next challenge.

(On a related note, huzzah on this site getting a forum soon. Hope it’s designed more like a traditional forum, especially with a “posts since last visit feature.” the ERE forum layout was my biggest annoyance with ERE :D )

I’m a little bummed to see ERE come to an end. However, all things do eventually come to an end. I hope Jacob keeps kicking azz in his new adventure. I learned a lot from Jacob and read his book with zeal! Good luck Jacob!

Congrats MMM for getting the torch passed-don’t change a thing. I look forward to many more insightful posts!

ERE and MMM are like a support group for other like-minded people. Every time someone gives me a “poor you” look when I tell them that my small family of 3 lives in a 1150 sq feet condo*, I remind myself that I am not crazy by remembering all of the people who read these two blogs – I am not alone.

*in our town, condos are mainly used by retirees. Others buy gigantic houses and then have to work like slaves for the banks until they are 65 at which point they (ironically) move to the condo.

5 years ago, (after many years of dumbly following the bank industry marketing), I realized that real question is “how LITTLE do I need to retire” not “how MUCH I need to retire”. From that day, it was blogs like this one that kept me going when occasionally I got discouraged or more often, when devil on my shoulder tried to talk me into spending my hard earned money on sports cars and super computers…

…just fyi, it’s your snarky and ever-so-slightly-off-color style that makes me come back and read the next article. I like (or I guess liked is the right word now) ERE… but find your style more appealing to my tastes. That’s not really a slam on ERE… just a personal taste thing.

I think it’s really cool (and also fascinating) that the 2 guys we turn to the most for this subject matter were both born outside of the US. They come here, figure out how to dominate “the system”, and then teach the Americans how to do it.

Yes, they’ve shown us how capitalism is supposed to work. We here in America like to pride ourselves on being a “capitalistic” country, but people are really consumerists who at the end of the day realize they’re exactly where they started.

and to discover that MMM is not listed even in the top 200! ERE was rnarked 74th! If MMM is getting the ERE torch, he’s got a long way to climb here :-) Of course, I already know that MMM doesn’t give two shits about being popular, just being the best. And that’s what it’s all about.

But a side comment, if I may. Jacob’s decision to take a job makes clear to me something I have always believed. People want “financial independence” not because they want “nothing to do,” but because the American workplace is, by and large, a soul-sucking snakepit, where people get fucked over and abused on a daily basis. I believe what people really want is to find some way to marry what they love to do with financial security, and do it in a humane environment. I’ve been doing that for over 30 years now, long before it was the fashionable financial trend. I often think that the objective of FI shouldn’t be merely finding a way out of the rat-race through frugality and investment, but should just as clearly be focused on finding a way to make a living that allows people to enjoy their lives and achieve FI by doing what they love to do, living frugally and within their means, and investing well. By my definition, I “retired” 30 years ago, but I still have a “job.” Jacob says, by his definition, he is no longer “retired,” but in my view he is, as is the MM family, because they continue to work at jobs, but jobs they love, doing work they like to do. Amen.

Thanks very much, Mr. Player. There is definitely be much more discussion to be had on the idea of work vs. retirement vs. financial independence – it is a fun topic to debate.

I was reading the many comments on Jacob’s farewell post, and there are a couple from this amazing complainypants douchbag-type guy who claims that Jacob (and presumably me too) has duped his readers into believing a fallacy about early retirement, just because some of the things he did after retiring continued to earn him some income. The douchebag’s premise was that he did it in order to sell more books or something like that. While I wanted to unleash a string of expletives at the guy, I decided instead to just celebrate the controversy and appreciate the fact that what we are doing here is not always understood. Being misunderstood is fun, because it means you are onto something more advanced than normal.

As for blog popularity, someone else pointed out that low ranking on Wisebread to me as well. I noticed that if you count the actual readers (feed subscribers or whatever), the rank would be in the top 100.. but Wisebread factors in other stuff that I don’t participate much in, like twitter and facebook followers. Since just typing stuff into this blog and conversing with readers uses up all my available computer time, I don’t foresee myself becoming a big twitter star or taking time to actually promote the blog and try to game a higher rank.

Jacob has done the right thing; both in leaving his blog and in passing the torch. I thought his philosophy was very well spelled out and after a while there’s only so much one can add to it. It would be unfair of us to expect him to remain static in his current status quo the rest of his life. And I never thought he came across as arrogant or condescending; to the contrary, the tone of the entire blog was always very respectful and civil.

With that said, the worst thing you can do is change your foul-mouthed style. It’s kind of refreshing actually to hear some cussing every now and then. Nothing like a well placed F-bomb to make your point, as long as it’s done in Mustacian Style. Congrats on the transfer of the torch.

I think poorplayer’s post is on the money, BTW. I think if I had a job that allowed for a perfect work-life balance, including a lot of freedom to travel and job security, I wouldn’t want to “retire” early. But unfortunately, most good paying jobs want to own your soul. That’s why the idea of early “retirement” is so appealing to many of us.

The beauty of FI is, then any job you have shifts in that direction, because you don’t really need it.
If you don’t need it, your boss can’t scare you into accepting unpaid overtime, or any of the other things people put up with because they are scared of being fired. With FI, you don’t need job security, and if your boss refuses to allow you the vacation you requested, you can just quit.

Exactly. It’s nice when you aren’t in a desperate situation, and don’t feel forced to eat sh*t on a daily basis at work. Other people can sense, too, when you’re desperate. If you’re not, they treat you better. Sad commentary on some bosses.
I don’t blame Jacob for taking a job, either; why pass up an opportunity to earn some more money?

Another ERE vagabond here. Sad to see Jacob sold out to flipping digits on a computer screen (I’am that alien from Mars..). At least you are blatant about making money from your blog. I like you and have already consumed much of your content.

Sure, I am experimenting with ads and commissions on stuff that I use myself like the ING bank account. And I will continue to do so – it’s educational and although I’ll never need to support myself or a family from blogging, I am curious how feasible it is for others to do so with a given level of visitors.

So far, it looks like it must be tough: this joint is making in the range of $3-$10 per day. But I make it more fun by sending all proceeds straight to charitable or environment-related causes, after paying for the blog’s own webhosting. More on this in the upcoming (someday) charity article.

I wouldn’t call ERE’s move any sort of a sellout, just as I would’t say my carpentry business is a sellout to the idea of retirement. We retired people do these things because it’s a way to learn more. When you’ve stopped being motivated by the idea of being able to spend more money on yourself, and you have given up on hedonism, you’re left with things like meaningful human relationships and challenging learning experiences. You need to seek them out every day, lest you feel like a big loser sitting on your couch while the rest of the world moves on.

Well the blog is running AdSense and affiliate programs for a reason. Why don’t you just run a minimal site like Ran Prieur and lower your hosting costs then.

Do you know the environment footprint of the entire internet? We already have the resources to make life meaningful and healthy for all. Humans just need to give up on trying to gain over others. You can’t compare a carpentry business with quant trading.

Yeah, the blog IS running adsense and the affiliate program for a reason: because I think it is a cool technology!

Note that running a simpler site does not lower the hosting costs – even the minimum programs at discount hosters like the Bluehost one that I use, feature unlimited storage and traffic (it is a good thing, too, looking at the gigabytes-per-month numbers these days). It’s only a few dollars per month.

The footprint of the internet is fairly large if you measure the manufacturing effort that goes into making the servers and the electricity to run them. Then you could scale it up further if you include the additional commerce that is facilitated by the internet. But then you could subtract the amount of travel that it prevents by allowing teleworking and video conferences and allowing people like me to never have to visit retail stores (other than grocery) for the rest of their lives. And on a ecological-footprint-per-user-per-hour basis, it is one of the cheapest forms of entertainment ever created. Compare it for example to having sex, with the side effect of quite a few accidental babies that need to be raised. :-)

Oh, and the fact that we can now share our best ideas regardless of wealth and social status, thus the internet is THE thing that will save the whole fucking human race from destroying itself ;-)

Still Don, I enjoy your even-simpler-than-me view of how life should be lived, so thanks for reading and thanks for the comments – hopefully you will continue to inspire me to continue to simplify and de-consumerize.

Read the Jevons paradox. Simple HTML sites can be hosted at home with a good router so you only pay the domain. Maybe you should read something about the ethics of “overselling” in the hosting business.

Hosting at home is WAY more inefficient and (environmentally) expensive than hosting with one of the hosting companies (I work in the field) by a huge margin. Not to mention bandwidth usage – MMM’s home Internet account would not be able to manage number of users visiting his page every day.

Picking on hosting as a source of environmental waste is silly. It is like saying that walking is better than driving, but you should walk barefoot because running shoes end up in the landfills.

I don’t mind having a major bank pay for hosting for the site that helps some people getting rid of their debt (it is actually very awesomely ironic).

And, if this results in some extra money going to the environmental causes, that is just a cherry on top.

I am taking Jacob’s advise and checking you out! After living frugally for decades in order to “buy our souls” back it is fun to see and share the same spirit around me. At it’s core a creativity of spirit.

Every day we determine the quality of our life by our choices, often rooted in how we spend money. I am so happy to see this passion grow. Nothing is better than waking up in the morning with choice. Best wishes and good cheer!

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